The Constitution: A document of, by, and for the rich for control of the
laws by which a government operates

By The Golem, 7 December 1998

Charles Beard in AN ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION OF THE CONSTITUTION,
MacMillan 1936) wrote: Inasmuch as the primary object of a
government, beyond the mere repression of physical violence, is the
making of the rules which determine the property relations of members
of society, the dominant classes whose rights are thus to be
determined must perforce obtain from the government such rules as are
consonant with the larger interests necessary to the continuance of
their economic processes, or they must themselves control the organs
of the government. The founders of Amerikkka knew full well they
had to control the government directly or control the laws and that
was what was in the minds of those 55 men (women were also
disenfranchised) of wealth, who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to
draw up the Constitution.

Though the people had to be checked, Madison wrote in his Federalist
Papers, men of substance and property, did not have to be checked
because they had investments and would therefore somehow be better
citizens because they had their investments to protect and that was
the naivete of James Madison and the other founding fathers.

And, wealthy men of substance move their investments wherever it
profits them and in so doing are destroying this republic that Madison
and others established to protect these same men of substance.

Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the
middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the
expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This brought loyalty. And
to bind that loyalty with something more powerful than even material
advantage, the ruling group found in the 1760s a wonderfully useful
device. That device was the language of LIBERTY and EQUALITY, which
could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England,
without ending either slavery or inequality. (A PEOPLE’S
HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, by Howard Zinn)

That was the stage for class struggle in the United States, a struggle
of survival for poor people in order to maintain an elite privileged
class in power and riches. Zinn points out that the Declaration of
Independence, like John Locke’s SECOND TREATISE ON GOVERNMENT,
talked about government and political rights, but ignored the
existing inequalities in property. And how could people truly have
equal rights, with stark differences in wealth?

Zinn wrote that the characteristic of the new nation: finding
itself possessed of enormous wealth, it could create the richest
ruling class in history, and still have enough for the middle classes
to act as a buffer between the rich and the dispossessed....

In OUT OF OUR PAST, Carl Degler writes, The men who engineered the
revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class. George
Washington was the richest person in America and John Hancock,
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson were all very rich men.

Charles Beard also noted that four groups were not with representation
at the Constitutional Convention: those without property, slaves,
indentured servants and women, and thus the Constitution did not
really reflect the intersts of the disenfranchised. The Constitution
WAS WRITTEN FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE WEALTHY. Qualifications for voting
at state levels required in most cases the owning of property and
excluded women, Indians and slaves and there were no popular elections
to higher office. The Constitution only ensured this greater permanent
division of society into a rich ruling class and poor working class.

Another interesting point is made by Robert E. Brown that the phrase
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, although it appears
in the Declaration of Independence, was altered to appear in the
Constitution as life, liberty, and property.

We don’t need anymore lies about the Constitution. The
Constitution was written for the rich. What this country needs is
change and creative new institutions and an _honest_ president who
stands for the interest of all the people, not the special class
interests of the rich.

We desperately need a clean environment, affordable housing, decent
mass transportation. The nation needs sanity and to vigorously move
away from the conspiratorical hypocracy that rules. We need
democracy for all the people and, We don’t have it, not
enough of it and we aim to get it and that’s human
nature—-or to put it in another way in the nature of our
humanity, to insist on decency, peace, and social justice.
[Michael Parenti/DEMOCRACY FOR THE FEW]